Paper house. Description of the activity.

During the development of a project, there are many situations in which the team should make a decision. Usually, there is not much time, and decisions should be taken quickly. To learn how to make good decisions under time pressure, we took part in an activity called "Paper house building".

This activity consists in building a little house with just a few tools: some sheets of paper, a pair of scissors, some adhesive, and a pencil. All the teams also received a list of objectives to reach (i.e., the house had to have a balcony, eight windows, one stairwell, etc). Each team had fifteen minutes to achieve the goals.

Our team, composed of Spaniards, Lithuanians, and Latvians, took five minutes to think about the strategy. Several tasks were distributed and all the team began to work.

To design the parts of the paper-house, we needed a great deal of creativity. An unexpected issue was the communication process. In order to make this one easy, we spoke in English and appointed a moderator (Guillermo and Andrew assumed this role).

Other issue was how to choose among several possibilities. For example, each problem had at least two or three possible solutions. The decision making process was very interesting and we learnt a lot with it.

A good way to improve the results was:

 1)  Thinking slowly about the strategy to take.

 2)  Listening to the proposals of all the members of the group.

 3) Defining the tasks of each member of the group. When all of the members have a well-      defined role in the project, the results improve.

 4)Having a group leader who controls the development of the project.

When the time was over, all the teams stopped their work. The jury examined all the teams’ paper houses. At this moment, we found that the results were very different for each team.

The main objective of team Nr. 1 was to achieve all the requests. However, the quality of the results was very good. Team Nr. 2 didn't reach the necessary organization to have a good project. Team Nr. 3 did quite well: in only fifteen minutes they had built a paper house with sufficient design and good structure: the objectives were reached.

Our team (team Nr. 4), made a house which didn't achieved all the requests, but the quality of the construction was extraordinary (excellent designs with a lot of creativity). As a result, the jury gives to our project the victory.

By this activity, we learnt about the importance of listening to all the members of the group, in order to optimize the potential and the talent of each one.